Osa Conservation: Piro Restoration Experiment
Updated on 2026-01-24
1 Introduction

The following represents the data exploration for the data collected during the collaboration between Osa Conservation and Earthwatch for the project entitled:
A multi-taxa approach comparing the success of active tropical rainforest restoration with old-growth forest in Costa Rica.
Also known as:
The Piro Restoration Experiment
The centralized document for the protocols used in this experiment lives here. Note, as this is a working document only OC staff currently have access.
1.1 Study area and survey locations
The following map shows the locations of all the surveys included within this project to date, coloured by simplfied treatment category: active restoration; natural restoration and forest control.
The number of survey locations for each category are as follows:
| Treatment | Number of Locations |
|---|---|
| active_restoration | 30 |
| forest | 24 |
| passive_restoration | 10 |
1.2 Historical survey timeline
NOTE We still need incorporate the vegetation data [Also - should we add historical dung beetle and butterfly data?]
1.3 Earthwatch survey timeline
Now lets zoom in on data collected since our collaboration with Earthwatch started:
And a summary of the number of different surveys conducted by year:
| Survey Type | 2017 | 2019 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Birds | 117 | 95 | 105 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 152 | 0 | 469 |
| Bats | 0 | 0 | 0 | 200 | 240 | 240 | 239 | 14 | 933 |
| Camera traps | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 155 | 0 | 155 |
| Amphibians | 120 | 121 | 124 | 56 | 0 | 0 | 68 | 0 | 489 |
| Small mammals | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 19 | 0 | 19 |
| Total | 237 | 216 | 229 | 256 | 240 | 240 | 633 | 14 | 2065 |